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Welcome to Northeastern University’s science and research blog. We call it iNSolution because that’s what our faculty and student researchers are in the business of—finding solutions to societal problems while simultaneously contributing to the fundamental knowledge base of their respective fields.

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Nanowire Hay Bales

This week at the annual meeting of the Amer­ican Phys­ical Society, a group of North­eastern sci­en­tists will present the Monet painting of the future. This pile of hay bales is not a close up of a lost classic from the impres­sionist master’s late-​​nineteenth cen­tury haystack series. Instead, it’s a close-​​up of mag­netic nanowires. Pegah M. Hos­sein­pour, a third year PhD stu­dent in the depart­ment of chem­ical engi­neering, added iron to stan­dard tita­nium nan­otubes giving them mag­netic, semi-​​conducting, and cat­alytic properties.

“Prop­erly engi­neered, these mate­rials hold promise for poten­tial appli­ca­tion in devices to effi­ciently absorb and transfer solar energy or to process data with increased speed, pre­ci­sion and accu­racy,” says Hosseinpour.

This image is fea­tured in the APS image gallery, along with another nan­otube mas­ter­piece from the team: A nano-​​scale “Devil’s post­pile.” (A beau­tiful geo­log­ical for­ma­tion in Cal­i­fornia made up of columnar basalt, which forms when a lava flow shrinks in the hor­i­zontal direc­tion as it rapidly cools.)

These ——————> are also iron-​​doped tita­nium nanowires, but here the scale is even smaller (about 2 orders of mag­ni­tude smaller than the hay bales above).

I love that the folks over at APS rec­og­nize how lovely a pretty pic­ture can be, even more so with a beau­tiful sci­en­tific story lurking behind it. This makes me wonder about the sci­en­tific story behind Monet’s haystacks…there must be one, right?

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About the Writer

Angela Herring is the science writer for the Northeastern news team. In a past life, she made fullerenes (aka bucky balls) at a small chemical company outside of Boston while freelance writing for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, the Broad Institute and Novartis Biomedical Research Institutes. She earned her Bachelor's degree in chemistry and literature from Bennington College in 2005. In addition to writing stories for the News@Northeastern, she also maintains the university's research blog: iNSolution.

News@Northeastern is Northeastern University’s primary source of news and information. Whether it happens in the classroom, in a laboratory, or on another continent, we bring you timely stories about every aspect of life, learning and discovery at Northeastern. Contact the news team